The practice of public human resource management has changed significantly in the past 5 years due to increased outsourcing, privatization and the diminution of public employee rights. This revised edition of a core handbook provides a wide variety of practicing managers and public human resource managers with authoritative and state-of-art information on the practice of public human resource management. This new Third Edition features contributions from Donald Klingner, Mary Guy, Jonathan West, Jeffrey Brudney, Montgomery Van Wart, and others. Expanded and updated coverage includes increased outsourcing, privatization, diminishing employee rights, and emergency/disaster management.

In times of rising expectations and decreasing resources for the public sector, performance management is high on the agenda. Increasingly, the value of the performance management systems themselves is under scrutiny, with more attention being paid to the effectiveness of performance management in practice. This new edition has been revised and updated to examine: performance in the context of current public management debates, including emerging discussions on the New Public Governance and neo-Weberianism; the many definitions of performance and how it has become one of the most contested agendas of public management; the so-called perverse effects of using performance indicators; the technicalities of performance measurement in a five step process: prioritising measurement, indicator development, data collection, analysis and reporting; and the future challenges and directions of performance management Performance Management in the Public Sector 2nd edition offers an approachable insight into a complex theme for practitioners and public management students alike.

Disputes over government policies rage in a number of areas. From taxation to climate change, from public finance to risk regulation, and from health care to infrastructure planning, advocates debate how policies affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being, how these effects balance against each other, and how trade-offs between overall well-being and inequality should be resolved. How to measure and balance well-being gains and losses, is a vexed issue. Matthew D. Adler advances the debate by introducing the social welfare function (SWF) framework and demonstrating how it can be used as a powerful tool for evaluating governmental policies. The framework originates in welfare economics and in philosophical scholarship regarding individual well-being, ethics, and distributive justice. It has three core components: a well-being measure, which translates each of the possible policy outcomes into an array of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, quantifying how well off each person in the population would be in that outcome; a rule for ranking outcomes thus described ; and an uncertainty module, which orders policies understood as probability distributions over outcomes. The SWF framework is a significant improvement compared to cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which quantifies policy impacts in dollars, is thereby biased towards the rich, and is insensitive to the distribution of these monetized impacts. The SWF framework, by contrast, uses an unbiased measure of well-being and allows the policymaker to consider both efficiency (total well-being) and equity (the distribution of well-being). Because the SWF framework is a fully generic methodology for policy assessment, Adler also discusses how it can be implemented to inform government policies. He illustrates it through a detailed case study of risk regulation, contrasting the implication of results of SWF and CBA. This book provides an accessible, yet rigorous overview of the SWF approach that can inform policy-makers and students.

With the resources of both governments and traditional philanthropy barely growing or in decline, yet the problems of poverty, ill-health, and environmental degradation ballooning daily, new models for financing social and environmental objectives are urgently needed. Fortunately, a revolution is underway in the instruments and institutions available to meet this need. Loans, loan guarantees, private equity, barter arrangements, social stock exchanges, bonds, social secondary markets, and investment funds are just some of the actors and tools occupying the new frontiers of philanthropy and social investment. Together they hold the promise of leveraging for social and environmental purposes not just the billions of dollars of charitable grants but the hundreds of billions, indeed trillions, of dollars of private investment capital.
While the changes under way are inspiring, they remain largely uncharted. This concise introduction to the topic, and its companion volume, provide the first comprehensive and accessible roadmap to these important advances. In the process, these works will better equip investors, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, business executives, government officials, and students the world over to capture the opportunities that these developments hold out to them and to our world.

This book argues that if public services are to be 'reformed' or 'improved', achieving the best possible quality of service is essential.It starts from the premise that citizens and users are the key 'stakeholders'. They need to be consulted and involved at every stage. Within inevitable resource constraints, it is their needs, balanced with those of society, which must be met. Service providers need to change their culture and behaviour to make this happen.This book presents a straightforward and comprehensive model for understanding quality and putting it into practice. Existing quality philosophies and approaches are examined. Overviews of recent policy on quality in central and local government, in the health service, and in public service partnerships are included. Finally, five practitioners present practical 'vignettes' of citizen involvement, local partnerships, and quality improvement in health, housing and local government.Providing Quality in the Public Sector is essential reading for students and practitioners in the fields of public policy, local government, health, housing and the voluntary sector.

Public services touch the majority of people in advanced and developing economies on a daily basis: children require schooling, the elderly need personal care and assistance, rubbish needs collecting, water must be safe to drink and the streets need policing. In short, there is practically no area of our lives that isn't touched in some way by public services. As such, knowledge about strategies to improve their performance is central to the good of society. In this book, a group of leading scholars examine some of the most pressing issues in public administration, political science and public policy by undertaking a systematic review of the research literature on public management and the performance of public agencies. It is an important resource for public management researchers, policy-makers and practitioners who wish to understand the state of the field and the challenges that lie ahead.

Digital Government: Managing Public Sector Reform in the Digital Era presents a public management perspective on digital government and technology-enabled change in the public sector. It incorporates theoretical and empirical insights to provide students with a broader and deeper understanding of the complex and multidisciplinary nature of digital government initiatives, impacts and implications. The rise of digital government and its increasingly integral role in many government processes and activities, including overseeing fundamental changes at various levels across government, means that it is no longer perceived as just a technology issue. In this book Miriam Lips provides students with practical approaches and perspectives to better understand digital government. The text also explores emerging issues and barriers as well as strategies to more effectively manage digital government and technology-enabled change in the public sector. Digital Government is the ideal book for postgraduate students on courses in public administration, public management, public policy, political science and international relations, and e-government. It is also suitable for public service managers who are experiencing the impact of digital technology and data in the public sector.

First published in 1951, the essays in this volume were the result of the extensive use in public administration of economists and other academic specialists in the field of social studies during the Second World War. Apart from the introduction by Sir Richard Hopkins, the contributions to this volume were restricted to economists and other university teachers who had come into the Government's service during the war and had returned to their pre-war occupations subsequently. The essays thus offer unique accounts of wartime administration in Great Britain from contributors who had direct personal involvement in the Civil Service.

After a quarter of a century of implementation of New Public Management (NPM) reform strategies, this book assesses the major real outcomes of these reforms on states and public sectors, at both the organisational level and a more political level. Unlike most previous accounts of reform, this book looks at how reform has changed the role of the public administration in democratic governance. Featuring case studies on the UK, Germany, France, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Post communist states, Mexico, South Korea, Turkey and the European Commission, and focusing on two issues this book:

• Examines the significant variations in the "trajectories" of administrative reform among West European countries on the basis of empirically rooted research on different national case studies.
• Assesses the extent to which these "constitutive" public policies have affected the institutions of government and the governing processes of our democratic occidental states and ask how have NPM-inspired programs, with their exclusive focus on managerialist objectives and instruments, challenged the political and democratic nature of public administration?

Looking at the broader issues relating to the current recompositions of democratic states, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of all matters relating to public administration and governance within political science, management, public law, sociology, contemporary history, and cultural studies.

From the dawn of the twentieth century to the early 1960s, public-sector unions generally had no legal right to strike, bargain, or arbitrate, and government workers could be fired simply for joining a union. Public Workers is the first book to analyze why public-sector labor law evolved as it did, separate from and much more restrictive than private-sector labor law, and what effect this law had on public-sector unions, organized labor as a whole, and by extension all of American politics. Joseph E. Slater shows how public-sector unions survived, represented their members, and set the stage for the most remarkable growth of worker organization in American history. Slater examines the battles of public-sector unions in the workplace, courts, and political arena, from the infamous Boston police strike of 1919, to teachers in Seattle fighting a yellow-dog rule, to the BSEIU in the 1930s representing public-sector janitors, to the fate of the powerful Transit Workers Union after New York City purchased the subways, to the long struggle by AFSCME that produced the nation's first public-sector labor law in Wisconsin in 1959. Slater introduces readers to a determined and often-ignored segment of the union movement and expands our knowledge of working men and women, the institutions they formed, and the organizational obstacles they faced.

What is good government? Why do some governments fail ? How do you implement political accountability in practice? What incentives do you need to put in place to ensure that politicians and public servants act in the public interest and not their own? These questions and many more are addressed in Timothy Besley's intriguing Lindahl lectures. Economic analyses of government usually divide into two broad camps. One which emphasizes government as a force for public good that can regulate markets, distribute resources and generally work towards improving the lives of its citizens. The other sees government as driven by private interests, susceptible to those with the power to influence its decisions and failing to incentivize its officials to act for the greater public good. This book adopts a middle way between the two extremes, the Publius approach, which recognizes the potential for government to act for the public good but also accepts the fact that things often go wrong. It shares the view that there are certain institutional preconditions for effective government but then proceed to examine exactly what those preconditions are. Timothy Besley emphasises that it is not just about designing an appropriate institutional framework but also about understanding the way incentives work and the process by which the political class is selected.

For the first two thirds of the twentieth century, British government was among the most stable in the advanced industrial world. In the last three decades, the governing arrangements have been in turmoil and the country has been a pioneer in economic reform, and in public sector change. In this book, Michael Moran examines and explains the contrast between these two epochs. What turned Britain into a laboratory of political innovation? Britain became a formal democracy at the start of the twentieth century but the practice of government remained oligarchic. From the 1970s this oligarchy collapsed under the pressure of economic crisis. The British regulatory state is being constructed in its place. Moran challenges the prevailing view that this new state is liberal or decentralizing. Instead he argues that it is a new, threatening kind of interventionist state which is colonizing, dominating, and centralizing hitherto independent domains of civil society. The book is essential reading for all those interested in British political development and in the nature and impact of regulation.

The global focus on raising more and better aid and securing debt relief means there is a growing need for clarity on how aid should be spent. More broadly there are questions about what poor country governments must and can do to ensure the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are met. This report argues that the MDGs will not be achieved, and poverty will not be overcome, without universal access to quality basic services--including health and education--provided through strong public systems.Informed by program experience and research, this report highlights critical failings in the approach of many governments and donors to providing basic services for poor people, and the need for a shift in the international consensus about how to increase provision and access to basic services. It argues that only public systems can deliver the scale, equity, and sustainability of basic service provision needed to meet the MDGs and overcome poverty, and that governments and donors need to make radical changes in the way they prioritize, invest in, and support public systems.This accessible, well-referenced report looks critically at success stories in the provision of public services, with case studies from countries including Armenia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. Published in cooperation with WaterAid.

Can we rely on the altruism of professionals or the public service ethos to deliver good quality health and education services? And how should patients, parents, and pupils behave - as grateful recipients or active consumers? This book provides new answers to these questions - a milestone in the analysis and development of public policy, from one of the leading thinkers in the field. It provides a new perspective on policy design, emphasising the importance of analysing the motivation of professionals and others who work within the public sector, and both their and public service beneficiaries' capacity for agency or independent action. It argues that the conventional assumption that public sector professionals are public-spirited altruists or 'knights' is misplaced; but so is the alternative that they are all, in David Hume's terminology, 'knaves' or self-interested egoists. We also must not assume that individual citizens are passive recipients of public services (pawns); but nor can they be untrammelled sovereigns with unrestricted choices over services and resources (queens). Instead, policies must be designed so as to give the proper balance of motivation and agency. The book illustrates how this can be done by detailed empirical examination of recent policies in health services, education, social security and taxation. It puts forwards proposals for policy reform, several of which either originated with the author or with which he has been closely associated: universal capital or 'demogrants', discriminating vouchers, matching grants for pensions and for long-term care, and hypothecated taxes.

Governance Networks in the Public Sector presents a comprehensive study of governance networks and the management of complexities in network settings. Public, private and non-profit organizations are increasingly faced with complex, wicked problems when making decisions, developing policies or delivering services in the public sector. These activities take place in networks of interdependent actors guided by diverging and sometimes conflicting perceptions and strategies. As a result these networks are dominated by cognitive, strategic and institutional complexities. Dealing with these complexities requires sophisticated forms of coordination: network governance. This book presents the most recent theoretical and empirical insights into governance networks. It provides a conceptual framework and analytical tools to study the complexities involved in handling wicked problems in governance networks in the public sector. The book also discusses strategies and management recommendations for governments, business and third sector organisations operating in and governing networks. Governance Networks in the Public Sector is an essential text for advanced students of public management, public administration, public policy and political science, and for public managers and policymakers.

This volume, the result of the 21st Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics (Ireland, 2013), describes the continuing problem of the decline of the postal sector in the face of electronic competition and offers strategies for the survival of mail services in a digital age.The 25 original papers in this collection provide econometric analyses on the changing demand and elasticity of mail in the modern era. Proposed solutions to declining interest in the postal sector include closer links between mail services and the digital sphere, expansion of the parcel sector, changes to the universal service obligation, legal reform and regulatory change. Professors and students of regulatory economics will have an interest in this book, as will managers and other decision-makers working within the postal sector. Contributors include: D. Bailly, L. Balk Hope, C. Borsenberger, A.T. Bozzo, M.D. Bradley, T.J. Brennan, K.L. Capogrossi, I. Carslake, M.M. Cigno, K.K. Clendenin, J. Colvin, H. Cremer, M.A. Crew, P. De Donder, B.K. Eakin, R. Eccles, K. Elkela, A. Fratini, F. Fustier, R.R. Geddes, D. Geradin, B. Gough, A. Gustafsson, A. Haller, J. Hearn, H. Hennessy, A. Hildingsson, A.C. Houck, G. Houpis, C. Jaag, L. Janin, D. Joram, S. Lecou, J. Levin, C. Malamataris, B. Marsh, M. Meidinger, M. Moloney, H. Nikali, C.J. Paterson, E.S. Pearsall, M.K. Perkins, J. Pickett, R. Sahly, S. Selander, C. Sheedy, M. Srinivasan, V.I. Stanford, C. Strobel, G. Swinand, U. Trinkner, T. Uotila, J. Vantomme, T. Walsh